Results by title

Ghady and Rawan is a heartfelt and timely novel by the award-winning author Fatima Sharafeddine (The Servant, Cappuccino) and Samar Mahfouz Barraj. The novel follows the close-knit friendship of two Lebanese teenagers, Ghady, who lives with his family in Belgium, and Rawan, who lives in Lebanon. Ghady’s family travels every summer to Beirut, where Ghady gets to spend all his time with Rawan and their other friends, enjoying their freedom from school. During the rest of the year, he and Rawan keep in touch by email. Through this correspondence, we learn about the daily ups and downs of their lives in Brussels and Beirut, including Ghady’s homesickness and his struggles with racism at school, as well as Rawan’s changing relationship to her family. The novel offers a glimpse into the lives of Lebanese adolescents while exploring a range of topics relevant to young people everywhere: bullying, parental conflicts, racism, belonging and identity, and peer pressure. Through the connection between the two main characters, Sharafeddine and Mahfouz Barraj show how the love and support of a good friend can help you through difficulties as well as sweeten life’s triumphs and good times.

A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society's secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation.

I Want Golden Eyes is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook.

Because books are forbidden in the Hive, Dalia secretly borrows math texts from the professor’s library and smuggles them to read in the Hive. When Professor Adam, who is famous for engineering embryos with enhanced genes, discovers Dalia’s crime, he enslaves her for two years in his library. Dalia seeks to flee the city with her family after overhearing the professor being ordered to design genetic traits for the president’s expected baby and realizes that Golden Eyes are not privileged by nature’s selection, as she was led to believe, but by authority and money.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, Society of Authors

A Palestinian girl travels to the past in a magical quest to save the world.

The Thunderbird trilogy is a fast-paced time-traveling fantasy adventure centered on Noor, a young orphaned Palestinian girl who starts in the present and must go back in time to get four magical bird feathers and save the world. Aided by a djinn cat and girls who look identical to Noor and who each have one of the bird’s powers, in this initial volume Noor begins her journey through different historical periods, striving to keep the wall between worlds intact.

The third book in a fast-paced time-traveling fantasy adventure trilogy centered on a young orphaned Palestinian girl who starts in the present and must go back in time to save the world.

In the third and final book of the Thunderbird trilogy, Noor finds herself in Byzantine Jerusalem, in the year 638 CE, where the city is under siege. She is joined by Sabeeka, the djinn who takes the form of a cat, and meets the twins Helena and Julian, who have the power of healing. The four team up to find the thunderbird. But before they can, they are swallowed by a giant wormlike creature called a bakasola, which takes them to the world beyond the wall that separates the world of the djinn from our ordinary human world. From the terrifying, dark, gloomy world of the bakasola, Noor and her friends are rescued and delivered to the colorful and peaceful world of the sakarik, where they discover the bakasola are stealing the golden liquid that keeps the sakarik alive. Will Noor and her friends rescue the sakarik and return to the human world in time to find the last two thunderbird feathers that will save the world?

Shortlisted for the 2023 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, Society of Authors

A Palestinian girl travels to the past in a magical quest to save the world.

The Thunderbird trilogy is a fast-paced time-traveling fantasy adventure centered on Noor, a young orphaned Palestinian girl who starts in the present and must go back in time to get four magical bird feathers and save the world.

In this second installment, Noor finds herself in the year 1177 in Jerusalem, during the Crusades. With the help of Sabeeka, Zainab, a girl who has the power to become invisible, and her local resistance group, Noor must once again find a feather belonging to the thunderbird before it burns, in order to prevent the world of the djinn from collapsing into the human world. Along the way, Noor helps the resistance group save hundreds of books and manuscripts from being burned. Like the first book in the Thunderbird trilogy, Book Two combines the magical with real events from Palestinian history to take the reader on a wild and adventurous ride through time.